Beatrice from The Hamlet of Motronivka

When you study the forgotten or expunged pages of our national history, you cannot help wondering at the richness of Ukrainian culture. This historical fact is no empty, catchy slogan or tribute to injured national self-adoration. The best illustration of this idea is not abstract reasoning but concrete human deeds and the destinies of those who built our spiritual world: geniuses and stars that shone with a “reflected light.” The life story of our heroine proves convincingly that our culture would have been impossible without such “second- magnitude stars.” Her story is like a song — heartbreaking, sad, yet radiant.

Hanna Barvinok (pen name of Oleksandra Bilozerska) was born on April 23, 1828, in the hamlet of Motronivka, near Borzna, Chernihiv province. The girl’s father, Mykhailo Bilozersky, was one of the most educated people in the area, who was known as a “freethinker,” “freemason,” and “Voltairean” (he liked reading the famous French philosopher in the original). At the same time, Bilozersky, a marshal of the local nobility, was a conscious Ukrainian who was sincerely and deeply interested in the newly-emerging Ukrainian literature. Oleksandra’s father died when she was just six years old. She was educated mostly at home and partly in private boarding schools. She completed her formal education at age fourteen, but the talented future writer’s inner world always remained restless, and she yearned not so much to acquire unsystematized knowledge as to implement the main idea of her life: serving the Ukrainian word is both happiness and a supreme duty.

Even for those with a superficial knowledge of the history of Ukraine’s national and spiritual revival, the name of Hanna Barvinok is inseparable from the life and deeds of her distinguished husband, Panteleimon Kulish, by far the most controversial classic of our literature and culture. Bilozerska and Kulish shared a fifty- year-long marriage that was by no means idyllic. Despite the ups and downs of their married life, Kulish could still write to his beloved wife, “Oh, no, my sweetheart, we will never die, we will devote our hearts to the Motherland, and they will illuminate the way for our still benighted and hapless people”). Their wonderful love story deserves to be described in a novel. Many friends, including the prominent Ukrainian scholar, pedagogue, and translator Ivan Puliuy, aptly called Bilozerska “our Beatrice” and “Kulish’s ideal wife.” This is no exaggeration. Here is a brief history of their relationship.

The fifteen-year-old Oleksandra and her future husband, who was nine years her senior, met in Motronivka: Kulish, who was already a promising writer, had come there to visit Oleksandra’s brother, his friend Vasyl Bilozersky, who later became a well- known cultural figure: an active member of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood and co-publisher of the first Ukrainian journal Osnova. As Vasyl recalled, his sister, who was brought up “under her mother’s watchful eye,” tried (or had) to behave modestly with Kulish. “Passionate and impatient, he (Kulish — Author) wanted her to return his affection,” Vasyl Bilozersky recollects, “but failed, and when he was leaving us for a tour of Kyiv province, he asked her to accept his portrait as a keepsake, but she refused. When he went out through our gate, he threw the picture into the gutter.” Did Kulish know that the “quiet” and “bashful” Oleksandra had literally said to her mother, “You don’t want me to marry Mr. Kulish — all right, I will obey you, but nobody else will ever be my husband”?

Proud and vulnerable, Kulish tried in vain for a year or so to forget Oleksandra; then suddenly he showed up again in the Bilozersky home. He had a frank talk with the girl’s implacable mother. When asked to “say the decisive word,” Oleksandra said she loved Panteleimon, but the elder Bilozerska reiterated that she would never marry her daughter off to him. That marked a pause in Kulish’s romance. In 1846 the writer was allowed to go abroad to do research on the Slavic languages. Before leaving, he decided to visit Motronivka. The impression was that the “tamed” love had flared up again and nothing could stem the tide. This time Oleksandra’s mother did not object as much to the marriage, perhaps because she thought that Kulish now had prospects for a good career. Looking back on those times, in 1905, at the age of 77, Hanna Barvinok wrote in a letter, “Can everybody boast of a three-year-long young, reciprocal, and searing love? This passionate love is still running high, and the reason why I’ve lived such a long life is that this life is ardent and based on reminiscences of the past.”

The marriage ceremony was performed on January 24, 1847, with Taras Shevchenko as the best man, who cracked endless jokes and witticisms. Panteleimon Kulish and Hanna Barvinok were married for more than half a century (Kulish died in early February 1897, right after the couple celebrated its “golden anniversary”). Their life together was full of dramatic moments. The young wife (incidentally, in her brilliant poetic reminiscences Oleksandra often calls her husband “my wife”) staunchly endured the humiliation of Kulish’s arrest and exile to Tula and displayed inexhaustible and wise patience during her husband’s affairs with other women. Those affairs, both real and fictional, are a favorite subject for those who mostly view the history of culture as something smutty and titillating.

Yet, it would be utterly unfair to reduce the role of Hanna Barvinok in Ukraine’s intellectual life by considering her merely as “Kulish’s wife.” For she was a talented, if unconventional, writer, a master of psychological prose (her short stories include The Mermaid, An Unhappy Destiny, A Loyal Couple, She’s Won, Friday, and many others), who was interested, “in the love life of the Ukrainian woman and in whether she is happy.” Hanna Barvinok recalls that she began her literary pursuits under persistent pressure from Kulish. Her husband wrote prefaces to two of her short stories, “An Evil Not without Good” and “A Summer in the Fall,” which were published in 1860 in the collection Khata. (She wrote her first short story, “A Jewish Serf,” in Warsaw in 1847, during her honeymoon with Kulish).

Hanna Barvinok’s novellas got a basically positive response from Borys Hrinchenko (“Her best short stories are among the finest examples of Ukrainian belles-lettres”), Ivan Franko, who called her “the poet of a woman’s woe,” and Dmytro Doroshenko, who thought that a number of Hanna Barvinok’s works “may well stand alongside world-famous images of poetic and tender feminine destiny.” Still, despite such an assessment, her books were hushed up and barred from publication in the Soviet era.

Oleksandra Bilozerska died on July 23, 1911. We have no right to forget the heritage of this noble and gifted woman, her inimitable poetic language. For example, here is how she described Shevchenko in her reminiscences (“A Lamentation for Shevchenko”): “You were our elder brother, but once you spoke, you seemed to be our youngest one. Quiet as it was, your word captivated all of Ukraine. You need no relatives or godchildren to find you a place in the other world, for you have sacrificed yourself, suffering for your ignorant brothers! No sooner had we looked back than you embarked on the Divine road, as if the sun had set at dusk.”

No one but Hanna Barvinok, who always kept Ukraine close to her heart, could write like this. She thus deserves at least to be remembered.